Take Action Against Your State’s Involvement with Interstate Crosscheck

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While most people know Kris Kobach from his involvement with Trump’s so-called “voter fraud” commission, Kobach has made a career on erecting barriers to make voting more difficult. As Kansas Secretary of State, Kobach championed the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program (“Interstate Crosscheck”), a program that aims to identify and remove voters registered in multiple states by matching registered voter lists across states.

Interstate Crosscheck supposedly matches first, middle and last name, plus birth date, and provides the last four digits of a Social Security number for additional verification. The program then makes the matches available to the participating states. But, even according to the officials who run the program, Interstate Crosscheck has problems. First, and foremost, the matching system creates hundreds of false positives, potentially removing correctly registered voters from the rolls just because the voters have similar names, like in Pennsylvania where the system matched over 300,000 voters. The system also incorrectly identifies fathers and sons as the same individual, ignoring designations like Jr., Sr., or III.

And, according toa recent Rolling Stone investigation, Interstate Crosscheck fails to match voters as advertised. Rather, the investigation found that one-fourth of the names on the list lacked middle-name matches, creating hundreds of matches for clearly different voters. Further, while social security numbers are supposed to provide additional verification, the Interstate Crosscheck manual states that “the numbers might or might not match,” providing no further verification. Several states have dropped out of the program citing problems with the methodology and unreliable data.

Interstate Crosscheck has also been criticized for, at best, disproportionately affecting young minority voters and, at worst, racial targeting. In Virginia alone, according toRolling Stone, Interstate Crosscheck swept 41,000 voters off the rolls, many for apparently erroneous reasons.

Take Action

We need you to take action now: check here to see if your state participates in Interstate Crosscheck. If they participate, contact your state election administrator — you can find their contact information here — and ask them to stop participating in Interstate Crosscheck. Here is a script to use when you call.